America, meet Rick Perry

She was carting around a cardboard cutout of her son, Sgt. James Benal, who's serving in Afghanistan. Perry was quickly prevailed upon to pose with “Flat Jim.”

It was a classic Perry moment familiar to Texans. He can focus on a soldier's mother, a farmer, a veteran in the crowd, and draw them in, make a connection and portray “I care” in a natural way for the cameras.

America met the other Perry, too, in his first week on the presidential campaign trail.

There was the Perry who suggested that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would be “treasonous” if he printed more money, called evolution “a theory that's out there” and said scientists have manipulated global-warming data.

Texans also are familiar with this Perry. He's the one who said schools are to blame if they lay off teachers due to state budget cuts, that the BP oil spill could have been an “act of God” — advising a reporter to “go look it up ... in the dictionary” — and once signed off a TV interview with “Adios, Mofo,” saying he didn't realize the broadcast signal still was live.

He's the same Perry known for being a focused, on-message candidate, leading some to speculate that his recent comments were meant to cement his appeal to the social conservatives crucial to the GOP nomination, despite the potential for scaring a broader audience.

Top Perry adviser Dave Carney called Perry's trip “widely successful,” adding, “The fact that Obama has spent so much time engaging the governor who still is miles behind our other GOP competitors is really a testament to the concern the Obama and his team have about a Perry nomination.”

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said, “The difference between a good politician and a bad politician is that the good one can take a gaffe and make it part of the master plan. ... That's not to say Perry will win the nomination or the election, but the country is now seeing why Perry has never lost an election and how he managed to demolish someone as popular as Kay Bailey Hutchison.”

Sabato added, “Obviously, Perry needs to stop talking about controversial social issues. He's creating TV ads for the Democrats if he wins the nomination. This just proves how different Texas and the country are, and how different a presidential race's scrutiny is compared to a governor's race even in a state the size of Texas.”

Perry got pretty high Iowa Fair praise from Benal: “I was hoping for a picture of the butter cow,” she said. “This is even better.”

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One of Perry's colorful comments inspired the title of an upcoming book by James C. Moore, co-author of “Bush's Brain,” and Democratic consultant Jason Stanford. They're writing “Adios Mofo: Why Rick Perry Will Make America Miss George W. Bush,” due out in early 2012. Does this put Stanford in the uncomfortable position of hoping the guy he tried to unseat as governor is viable at least until the book's out? Stanford said, “I'll make Rick Perry a deal. I won't write the book of he drops out. I'll do that for America, because I love freedom as much as he does.”

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Lest we think politics is all games, a KIDS COUNT report released last week, and reported on by my colleague Gary Scharrer showed an aspect of Texas that Perry's unlikely to highlight in his presidential race. One of every four Texas children lives in poverty, and Texas has the worst rate of “food insecure” children in the country — one in four children live in homes in which their parents don't know where they'll get their next meal or how they'll pay for it. It reminded me of a post on the Capital Area Food Bank's website under the haunting headline, “Ten-year-old Jose stays active to prevent thinking about hunger.” It quotes the child: “Sometimes we don't have that much food. I just play some board games or I sleep, or do something active so I don't think about it. We're just trying to get the family to keep on going.”